You Could Write Simpler Code in Android: Monitoring Changed Text in An EditText Field

While working on my recent project, several times while trying to implement a feature I came across several articles online whose code advocated writing long lines of code. This could be as a result of the articles being written a long time ago(In android, a long time could be as short as six months). This informed my choice to create a series where I highlight simpler ways of writing code than the ones commonly available online when using ktx extensions.

This article is going to be a short one just to illustrate how much fewer lines of code you could write. A particular scenario you might be faced with is getting the changing text when a user inputs value into an edittext field. The situation might also mean you want a particular event to occur anytime the text in the field changes.

To accomplish this task, a cursory search on google might take you to a stackoverflow page where the top three answers may look like this one:

Or this one:

After seeing these answers you get the feeling that you are writing a lot of code just to get the text that was changed or to be notified when the text changes. Don't worry I get the feeling. I had the same exact feeling

I discovered that it could be accomplished with just three lines of code. A call to the doOnTextChanged was enough to do my bidding.

	var myEditText = findViewById<EditText>(R.id.myEditText)
	myEditText.doOnTextChanged { text, start, before, count ->
	run {
	// run your code here.
	// the text is the changed text
	}
	}

view raw edit.kt hosted with ❤ by GitHub

My next article would be on Navigation drawer stay tuned